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First and Second Kings are one literary work that was divided into the two books we have today when translators rendered the Hebrew text into the Greek Septuagint. That division was carried through to the Latin Vulgate and subsequently into modern Bible translations. The Septuagint and Vulgate combined 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 […]
Most people who have picked up a Bible have at some time thought: “Well… this makes no sense!” The Bible is a dense collection of writings that was written over centuries. It is no wonder that it does not always make for easy reading. Many modern Christians are hesitant to dive deep into the […]
In 1911, Henri Matisse arrived in Moscow upon the invitation of a famous art collector called Sergei Shchukin. Known for his radical taste, Shchukin acquired works by Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne at a time when their art was scarcely accepted, even in Western circles. In Moscow, Matisse encountered Russian Orthodox icons and was struck […]
Lost beneath Pakistan and India’s plains, the Indus—or Harappan—Civilization flourished between 2700-1900 BCE, building the ancient world’s biggest cities long before we even knew they existed. Unearthed only in 1924, these sites reveal no sprawling palaces, temples or writings, but neat brick grids laced with sewers, wells, and stout citadels. The evidence points to […]
The events recorded in the Bible cover thousands of years with thousands of proper names. One way to impose order on such complex material is to classify it in terms of the empires that were dominant at the time in which the major events occurred. This is an especially useful method since many of […]
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First and Second Kings are one literary work that was divided into the two books we have today when translators rendered the Hebrew text into the Greek Septuagint. That division was carried through to the Latin Vulgate and subsequently into modern Bible translations. The Septuagint and Vulgate combined 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 […]
This is the second part of our series (I) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. As we’ve discussed, pre-modern peasant farmers make up the vast majority of human beings in in the past. Last week we started by looking at the basic … Continue reading Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End →
Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War. Traditionally, that war has been dated to the late Bronze Age, approximately c. 1200 BCE. However, the Iliad itself was not written that early in history. There is wide agreement that Homer—or whoever the true author of the Iliad was—lived much, much later than this. […]
Among the kings of England there have been eight Henrys, eight Edwards, and six Georges but there has only ever been one John. His successors did not want to be associated with the stain the name had in the minds of the English people. Considering what the monk Matthew Paris penned (writing decades after […]